Design
For African Americans, Park Access Is About More Than Just Proximity
A new study shows that the legacy of racial discrimination still looms heavily.
The Trust for Public Land has just released its annual scores and rankings on city parks across the U.S., as Laura Bliss reports. These scores claim to evaluate what the trust considers the “three important characteristics of an effective park system: acreage, facilities and investment, and access.”
While this assessment is supposed to be the gold standard for determining park quality, its criteria is severely undermined by its failure to consider the legacy of racism in the U.S. park system. This holds especially true when looking at access, which the TPL defines as “the percentage of the population living within a 10-minute (half-mile) walk of a public park.”